Of all the gifts HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum has given the Arab world’s young people, two stand out for their simplicity: classrooms and books. Dubai Cares, launched in 2007, carries education to children in the developing world. The Arab Reading Challenge, launched in 2015, turned reading into the region’s biggest school competition. Both now sit under his Mohammed Bin Rashid Global Initiatives — and both express the conviction at the centre of his leadership: a nation’s real wealth is what its young people know.
This guide explains what each initiative does, why a ruler of a rich city spends his capital on other countries’ schoolchildren, and how these gifts connect to everything else — the coders, the Mars probe, the universities rising at home.
Dubai Cares: Schooling as Strategy
Dubai Cares was founded in 2007 to tackle the most stubborn root of poverty: children, mostly girls in the poorest regions, who never get a quality primary education. Its programmes build and support schooling where states are weakest — the philosophy being that a classroom changes a life earlier and more permanently than almost any other intervention.
The initiative reflects its founder’s biography. The boy educated in small-town Dubai, who watched education transform his own generation’s prospects, treats schooling the way his father treated ports: as the infrastructure on which everything else depends.
The Arab Reading Challenge: A Competition for Books
The Arab Reading Challenge, launched in 2015 under MBRGI, gamified the habit his culture reveres. Schoolchildren across the Arab world read and summarise books through the school year, competing through rounds for top honours — reading, in other words, run exactly like one of his races for excellence: public, measured, and with the whole region invited.
The scale of participation turned the challenge into one of the largest educational initiatives in the Arab world, and its message was aimed at a generation raised on screens: the written word — in Arabic, especially — is still the master key. Coming from a ruler who is himself a published Nabati poet, the campaign is also personal testimony.
Why Other Countries’ Children?
Critics of foreign aid ask why a state helps abroad while needs exist at home. His career supplies the answer twice over. Practically, an educated region is a prosperous, stable market for a trading city whose wealth depends on its neighbourhood. Philosophically, his official line refuses the distinction: “We are building a new reality for our people, a new future for our children, and a new model of development” — and the model only deserves the name if it can be exported.
The domestic mirror images complete the picture: the One Million Arab Coders initiative (2017) for digital skills, the Hope Probe (2021) for scientific ambition, and a knowledge economy at home built through Internet City and the universities. Dubai Cares and the Reading Challenge are the same policy, addressed to the wider Arab family.
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The Gifts That Compound
A tower depreciates; an educated child compounds for sixty years. Sheikh Mohammed, the region’s most famous builder of physical things, has spent a striking share of his legacy budget on the invisible asset of other people’s learning. It may be the clearest proof that his famous motto — “In the race of excellence… there is no finish line” — was never really about the buildings at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Dubai Cares?
An initiative launched in 2007, now under MBRGI, that funds and supports quality primary education for children in developing countries, attacking poverty at its root.
What is the Arab Reading Challenge?
Launched in 2015, it is a region-wide competition in which Arab schoolchildren read and summarise books through the year — designed to rebuild a culture of reading at massive scale.
Why does Dubai fund education abroad?
Because his development model treats human capability as the real wealth — and an educated, prosperous region is also the best neighbourhood for a trading city. The same belief drives his coders initiative and science programmes at home.
How do these initiatives connect to his other work?
They are the humanitarian wing of one consistent bet on people: Dubai Cares and the Reading Challenge abroad; One Million Arab Coders and the Hope Probe’s inspiration at home.
